Narrative
The Corinovans are in retreat, “B” division has been destroyed holding the coastal city of Viana and now inland, “A” division is dangerously exposed to isolation by the rampant Gombardian forces.
Remnants of “B” division and elements of “C” division in retreat, continued to try and intercept Gombardian thrusts on “A” division’s eastern flank.
My previous Fauxterre post covered the strategic situation that lead to this action.
The game
Essentially this is an escalating engagement and I simply used the scenario from Neil Thomas’ “An introduction to wargaming”. His World War Two rules reflect his simple yet interesting approach you can find in his more popular books like one hour wargames, C19th Century European warfare or ancient and medieval warfare.
The rulebook offers four scenarios
Encounter
Frontal assault
Surprise assault
Escalating engagement
I opted for an escalating engagement action reflecting the chaos of a rapid advance experienced by both sides.
I took the real world unit lists in the book and came up with two slightly different lists for the Gombardians – plenty of armour like Germans while the Corinovans were more likely to field infantry like the French.
I used my own table for observation – everything had an observation rule to help cause friction that’s required for a solo game.
The scenario set victory conditions based on three shared objectives – the winner having two or all three at the end of the game. I had a count down variable tracker but this had not expired when one side patently had run out of forces.
The three objectives were the
Town
Sawmill
Orchard
Both sides quickly acquired either the sawmill or town.
It remained simply to fight it out for the orchard.
As the table was created first before selecting the scenario it was also the case that the opposing forces diced for arrival points.
Each side had 9 units and deployed 3 units to start but I also applied scenario requirements that all six remaining units arrived on an improving odds dice throw each turn.
Here is some of the key action.
The action now centres on the walled orchard
The battle moves toward a conclusion
The Gombardians had arrived with armour which fits the scenario of a fluid front in the campaign situation. But they did not have enough infantry to take on the Corinovans in the congested orchard area.
The army lists therefore helped create an asymmetric game and the armour heavy force on this occasion lost.
The Wargaming Erratic 